Who: Mark DeRosa, 38-year-old right-handed hitting utility player and good clubhouse guy. Six-foot-one, 215 pounds, No. 35.
Provenance: Passaic, New Jersey. Not far from Hackensack. DeRosa was selected by the Atlanta Braves in the seventh round of the 1996 amateur draft out of the University of Pennsylvania. He debuted for the Braves in September of 1998.
Contract status: DeRosa signed one-year, $750,000 contract with the Jays in Jan. 2013. A $750,000 club option for 2014 is included, with a $25,000 buyout.
Back of the baseball card: In 15 MLB seasons, DeRosa has played 1153 games with the Braves, Rangers, Cubs, Indians, Cardinals, Giants and Nationals. He has posted a .340 OBP, .412 slugging in 3858 plate appearances. DeRosa hit 93 dingers, including a career-high 23 in 2009 between Cleveland and St. Louis. His last homer was on April 5, 2010. He has a career WAR of 12.3 according to Fangraphs, including a 4.3 in 2008 with the Cubs.
2012 stats: In 48 games with the Nationals, DeRosa made 101 plate appearances, with an OBP of .300 (okay, not bad) and a slugging percentage of .247 (yeesh). He had a strikeout rate of 17.8 per cent with a walk rate of 13.9 per cent.
Injury history: A long list of ailments over the past five years has served to limit DeRosa’s effectiveness. He missed two months early and one month late in 2012 with oblique strains. DeRosa missed more than three months of 2011 with wrist problems, which had previously ended his 2010 season in May.
Looking back: DeRosa’s medical chart screams “retire already!”. He hits the ball so tepidly that his isolated power numbers over the past three seasons – .065, .023, .059 from 2010 through 2012 respectively – profile more along the lines of a skinny teenage infielder.
DeRosa’s real skill or added value to the team is alleged to be the way he ties the room together, not unlike like Lebowski’s rug. If that’s the case, then you’d have to assume his intangible value is off the imperceptible chart, if only because the less ethereal value is so scarce as to be impossible to find in the stat lines.
It wasn’t always this way, and there was a moment in his career where DeRosa had emerged as a second-tier star. After signing a three-year deal with the Cubs in 2007, DeRosa more than lived up to the bargain, posting a .800 OPS (.355 OBP, .445 SLG) through the deal’s conclusion with the Cardinals. He averaged 18 homers and filled in admirably around the diamond, getting reps everywhere but pitcher, catcher and centrefield.
Injuries have severely limited DeRosa in the past five seasons, and his wrist injury seems to be chronic. If past injury history is the most telling harbinger of future trouble, the chances of getting much more than 100 plate appearances seems remote.
Looking ahead: The current narrative is that DeRosa is in camp to be the new, older and wiser best pal of Brett Lawrie. Maybe he’s there to hide the Red Bull, or to suggest a use for his time and money that doesn’t include more ink on the marginal segments of exposed flesh that the young phenom has remaining.
With today’s news that Lawrie will start the season on the disabled list, though, it seems as though DeRosa will have a role to immediately fill in for the first week of the season, and maybe longer.
For all of the data that has piled up through a long career thus far, it’s hard to say what to expect from DeRosa in the short term. Is there any pop left in his bat? And that’s not to kid ourselves into thinking of him as any sort of power threat…but can he hit a double? Or send something past the infielders with enough gusto that a .235 BABIP doesn’t become the norm?
Pessimistically: Gets injured quickly, ushers in the Andy LaRoche era before they even start opening the dome on a regular basis.
Optimistically: 2009 is a long time ago now, but is it out of the question to think that DeRosa could keep his OPS above .700 and play in more than 50 games?